Protectionism will not work for a number of reasons:
- what US industry will you be protecting? The automotive? That is already globally uncompetitive. How does the US benefit by protecting uncompetitive industries which cannot sell their output overseas or even at home given their consumers’ inability to afford their running costs or their output without going into increasingly unaffordable debt?
- tariffs work both ways. A non productive economy reliant on imports is likely to impoverish its own consumers faster with such policies;
- countries which have used tariffs successfully to develop their own economies in the past have used tariffs against imports with subsidies for domestic production, government assistance in developing export potential and targeted policies to develop the requisite talent/skill pool and infrastructure to promote economic diversity . Hardly any of these have used tariffs on their own;
- that last issue highlights the importance of a credible policy making apparatus that works towards augmenting the common wealth in national interest. Given that most of the investment houses are being bought out by SWFs which work for their governments’ interests, what chance has the US got to develop such a strategic policy apparatus? These foreign governments do not have to engage in overt lobbying. They can make corporate decisions to liquidate their investments if they deem the environment to be hostile to their interests. This will only hasten the next real recession and hopes of recovering at all from the current one very very slim. It is worth bearing in mind that Arab oil producers and China in particular are bailing out the failed businesses as a way to minimise their losses of US$ holdings in the short to medium term.

Tariffs suggest a desire to retreat into isolationism. That’s akin to burying your head in the sand rather than facing issues to chart a way forward out of this morass. The world is not going to evaporate just because the US decides it isn’t there. How in heaven’s name are you going sell your major export of lethal WMDs to a so called nonexistent world?

The recession is going to hurt. Look at it as the pain of initiation into responsible maturity from a self centred profligate adolescence.

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Ian, there cannot be much profit in honesty.

agreement, indeed… and hope we can move forward from here!

If you are posting comments that agree with Ian’s fine work and you are in debt or getting ready to go into debt then you are part of the insanity.

Stop it. Start tonight. You’ve got to break free.

TBoy

I’ve seen entire departments be effectively destroyed by “managing what you can measure”, then measuring the wrong things and not understanding what was important that couldn’t be measured. It still makes me angry to this day and is one of the main reasons I quit my last corporate job.

If you said “I want to run a report to find out how much more money I would get in my annual bonus if we fired all the janitors and hired a cleaning company,” you’d have been looked at like you had three heads. But now the numbers can be run on your own computer, no one else needs to know until you’ve figured out how to sell the cuts and/or hide how much will end up in your own pocket.

Spreadsheets are also dangerous because unless you go through and personally doublecheck every formula, all sorts of shit can get finessed. I had a boss who always got copies of the spreadsheets and did a formula audit. Amazing how people will believe anything that comes out of a spreadsheet.

With all due respect the problem is far more profound than the U.S. We as a species have been driven crazy by inferiority. We use capitalism and nationalism to distinguish ourselves from the rest of humanity. It is insane to believe one human is better than another because he or she is richer, has a higher (more powerful) position, or is of a certain nationality or race. In the long run, as Lord Keynes said, we’ll all be dead. That includes the people who, for one reason or another, think they’re special.

Marx said capitalist countries would be first to embrace communism. Didn’t turn out to be true because the average worker dreams of making it and is so mired in the standard fantasy he is not deterred by long odds. That’s why lotteries work. You can’t win if you don’t play, but you won’t win if you play.

The solution is utopia, classless societies, but liberals on this blog don’t see utopia as a reasonable solution because human nature won’t allow it. (more negative imagery) and we, individualists all, don’t like the idea of being just one of the bunch, although that is what we are. We can’t escape our humanity no matter what delusions society offers to persuade us that we can.